Gaon Connection founder Neelesh Misra shares his ideas about content creation, fake news and journalism.
India’s young audience has great maturity, well-known radio storyteller, scriptwriter and lyricist Neelesh Misra has said, while sharing his ideas about content creation.
Misra, the founder of rural media platform — Gaon Connection — also spoke about the kind of content that “must actually be circulated and appreciated”. He was speaking at the 10th edition of ThePrint’s ‘Democracy Wall’ at PSIT Kanpur Friday.
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To a question about who was to be blamed for the kind of content that was garnering traction, Misra said, “We (storytellers and content creators) haven’t done our work properly and put the blame on the audience.”
Misra, however, had a word of appreciation for India’s young audience, who, according to him, “has great maturity”.
He also said writers have a major responsibility of ensuring that villages were not stereotyped in their work.
When asked about how much traction his content receives, Misra said his pilot programme, ‘Mobile Chaupal’, which he did in collaboration with Facebook, got a 12 million viewership in the month it was put up online.
At a time when there is a vast amount of content centred around Bollywood, he chose to offer a different kind of content, Misra said, adding that he is thankful to his audience for the overwhelming response they have showed.
On fake news
When asked about his take on fake news, Misra said, “We cross our boundaries when we forward those fake news messages on WhatsApp.”
Commenting further he said that fake news “has cost the lives of people. And this is horrifying”. He questioned the armchair dissemination of knowledge that Twitter users engaged in and said that because of their imagined cause, “people’s lives were being taken away”.
He urged the audience to measure the amount of time they spent on mediums such as WhatsApp and reflect on what use they made of it.
Art of storytelling
Answering a question on the significance of storytelling in today’s world, Misra said that he was wrong about his audience when he initially started this work. Self-correcting himself back then, he realised that his young audience wasn’t interested only in the ‘Honey Singh’ type of content.
“We were wrong in understanding that the young audience wanted only frivolous content,” he said.
He mentioned that he had an amazing audience from the country’s northeast region. He gave an instance of his youngest and oldest viewers being from the same family. “My youngest listener is of five years. He knows all the characters and the oldest audience is his grandparents,” Misra said.
“It’s the most beautiful and gratifying as a communicator that it just came together, we didn’t have to do anything,” he added.
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When asked if he was contemplating of bringing people from the urban set-up as characters in his content, Misra responded by saying, “There is a village inside all of us. Our work is to show honest rural content.”
Approach of reporters while covering news
Coming to journalism, he claimed that many a times reporters themselves become ‘news’ and not what is being covered on field.
“This whole branding of journalists over the years (started with TV), coupled with their political views is a deadly combination,” he said.
Before winding up, Misra narrated a story and sang a song that seemed to have struck a chord with the audience.